Dame Helen Mirren DBE (born Helen Lydia Mironoff; born 26 July 1945) is an English actor. The recipient of numerous accolades, she is the only performer to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting in both the United States and the United Kingdom. She received an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, a Tony Award and a Laurence Olivier Award for the same role in The Audience, three British Academy Television Awards for her performance as DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Children's and Family Emmy Award.
Mirren's stage performance as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Youth Theatre in 1965 provided her an opportunity to join the Royal Shakespeare Company, before making her West End stage debut in 1975. She subsequently went on to achieve success in film and television, appearing in films such as The Madness of King George (1994), Gosford Park (2001), and The Last Station (2009), receiving Academy Award nominations for each of those performances. For her role on Prime Suspect, which ran from 1991 to 2006, she won three consecutive British Academy Television Awards for Best Actress (1992, 1993 and 1994)—a record of consecutive wins shared with Dame Julie Walters—and two Primetime Emmy Awards.[6] She played Queen Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), and Queen Elizabeth II in the film The Queen (2006); she is the only actor to have portrayed both of the regnant Elizabeths on screen.[7]
After her breakthrough role in The Long Good Friday (1980), Mirren appeared in a variety of other films including Cal (1984), for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, 2010 (1984), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), Calendar Girls (2003), The Tempest (2010), The Debt (2010), Hitchcock (2012), The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), Woman in Gold (2015), Eye in the Sky (2015), Trumbo (2015), and The Leisure Seeker (2017). She has also appeared in several action films such as Red (2010) and its sequel Red 2 (2013), as well as in the Fast & Furious film franchise The Fate of the Furious (2017), Hobbs & Shaw (2019), and F9 (2021).
In the Queen's 2003 Birthday Honours, Mirren was appointed a Dame (DBE) for services to drama, with investiture taking place at Buckingham Palace.[8][9] She's received numerous honours including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013,[10] the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2014,[11] and Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2022.[12]
Early life
Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff on 26 July 1945[13][14] at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in the Hammersmith district of London,[15][16] to an English mother and Russian father.[17] Her mother, Kathleen "Kitty" Alexandrina Eva Matilda (née Rogers; 1908–1996), was a working-class woman from West Ham, the thirteenth of fourteen children born to a butcher whose own father was the butcher to Queen Victoria.[17][18] Mirren's father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff (1913–1980), was a member of an exiled family of the Russian nobility; he was taken to England when he was two by his father, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov.[17] Pyotr Mironov, who owned a family estate near Gzhatsk (now Gagarin), was part of the Russian aristocracy. His mother, Mirren's great-grandmother, was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, an aristocrat and a descendant of Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, a prominent Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars.[14][19] Pyotr Mironov served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He became a diplomat and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917.[20][21] He settled in England and became a London cab driver to support his family.[22]
Vasily Mironoff also played the viola with the London Philharmonic Orchestra before World War II.[17] He was an ambulance driver during the war, and served in the East End of London during the Blitz.[23] He and Kathleen Rogers married in Hammersmith in 1938, and at some point before 1951 he anglicised his first name to Basil.[24] Shortly after Helen's birth, her father left the orchestra and returned to driving a cab to support the family. He later worked as a driving-test examiner, then became a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport.[13][17] In 1951, he changed the family name to Mirren by deed poll.[24] Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist".[25] She was the second of three children; she has an older sister Katherine ("Kate"; born 1942) and had a younger brother Peter Basil (1947–2002).[26] Her paternal cousin was Tania Mallet, a model and Bond girl.[27] Mirren was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.[28]
Mirren attended Hamlet Court primary school in Westcliff-on-Sea, where she had the lead role in a school production of Hansel and Gretel,[29][30] and St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she also acted in school productions. She subsequently attended a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on North End Road. At the age of eighteen, she passed the audition for the National Youth Theatre (NYT); and at twenty, she played Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, a role which she says "launched my career" and led to her signing with agent Al Parker.[31][32]
Theatre career
Early years
As a result of her work for the National Youth Theatre, Mirren was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). While with the RSC, she played Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Diana in All's Well That Ends Well (1967), Cressida in Troilus and Cressida (1968), Rosalind[33] in As You Like It (1968), Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1970), Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies at the Aldwych (1971), and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place (1971). She also appeared in four productions, directed by Braham Murray for Century Theatre at the University Theatre in Manchester, between 1965 and 1967.[34]
In 1970, the director and producer John Goldschmidt made a documentary film, Doing Her Own Thing, about Mirren during her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Made for ATV, it was shown on the ITV network in the UK. In 1972 and 1973, Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US, during which they created The Conference of the Birds. She then rejoined the RSC, playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.
Sally Beauman reported, in her 1982 history of the RSC, that Mirren—while appearing in Nunn's Macbeth (1974), and in a letter to The Guardian newspaper—had sharply criticised both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure, declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the Theatre", and adding, "The realms of truth, emotion and imagination reached for in acting a great play have become more and more remote, often totally unreachable across an abyss of costume and technicalities..." This started a big debate, and led to a question in parliament. There were no discernible repercussions for this rebuke of the RSC.[35][36]
West End and RSC
At the West End's Royal Court Theatre in September 1975, she played the role of a rock star named Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles, a musical play by David Hare; she reprised the role the following year in a revival of the play at Wyndham's Theatre in May 1976.
Beginning in November 1975, Mirren played in West End repertory with the Lyric Theatre Company as Nina in The Seagull and Ella in Ben Travers's new farce The Bed Before Yesterday ("Mirren is stirringly voluptuous as the Harlowesque good-time girl": Michael Billington, The Guardian). At the RSC in Stratford in 1977, and at the Aldwych the following year, she played a steely Queen Margaret in Terry Hands' production of the three parts of Henry VI, while 1979 saw her 'bursting with grace', and winning acclaim for her performance as Isabella in Peter Gill's production of Measure for Measure at Riverside Studios.
In 1981, she returned to the Royal Court for the London premiere of Brian Friel's Faith Healer. That same year she also won acclaim for her performance in the title role of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a production of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre which was later transferred to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London. Reviewing her portrayal for The Sunday Telegraph, Francis King wrote: "Miss Mirren never leaves it in doubt that even in her absences, this ardent, beautiful woman is the most important character of the story." In her performance as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl—at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in January 1983, and at the Barbican Theatre in April 1983—she was described as having "swaggered through the action with radiant singularity of purpose, filling in areas of light and shade that even Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker omitted." – Michael Coveney, Financial Times, April 1983.[37]
At the beginning of 1989, Mirren co-starred with Bob Peck at the Young Vic in the London premiere of the Arthur Miller double-bill, Two Way Mirror, performances which prompted Miller to remark: "What is so good about English actors is that they are not afraid of the open expression of large emotions. British actors like to speak. In London, there’s a much more open-hearted kind of exchange between stage and audience" (interview by Sheridan Morley: The Times 11 January 1989).[38] In Elegy for a Lady she played the svelte proprietress of a classy boutique, while as the blonde hooker in Some Kind of Love Story she was "clad in a Freudian slip and shifting easily from waif-like vulnerability to sexual aggression, giving the role a breathy Monroesque quality".[39]
On 15 February 2013, at the West End's Gielgud Theatre she began a turn as Elizabeth II in the World Premiere of Peter Morgan's The Audience.[40] The show was directed by Stephen Daldry. In April she was named best actress at the Olivier Awards for her role.[41]